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Internet Continues To Revolutionize PR Profession

Peter Pollak, Empire Information Services

October 2005
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The early days of the Internet spawned a slew of cheerleaders and enthusiasts. Although overboard pronouncements – like those that foresaw the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching 30,000 – are long forgotten, we tend to lose sight of the dramatic impact Internet technology has had on the public relations profession. At the risk of being mistaken for a naïve cheerleader, I’d venture to say some of the changes are indeed revolutionary.

In this piece, I’ll point out how technology is changing the pr profession, changes which pr people ignore to their peril.

Let me define my starting point. Picture the good old days when the two arms of public relations typically involved separate activities often managed by separate people in the same department. The first arm – community relations – had to do with reaching out directly to the intended audience – whether members, customers or the general public. The second – media relations – involved communicating with news organizations in the hopes that your information would be incorporated into their content.

Community relations revolved around events, such as ribbon cuttings, charity auctions, speaking engagements and the like, where your company came in direct contact with the public. Media relations typically meant issuing a press release, which had to be printed, folded, stuffed into an envelope and then mailed to your trusty media list.

Along came computers and then the Internet and as a result, today few people mail out a press release and keeping a website up-to-date is now an important part of community relations.

Other than increasing the workload, how have those changes impacted what PR professionals do?

It may be obvious, but I’ll bet many of you underestimate the impact of the fact that the public can now read your press releases. In the past only your boss and the media read your releases. Today, assuming you post them to your website, your releases are available to a number of new constituencies – employees, prospects, clients, vendors, competitors as well as the general public.

Do you truly consider the fact that your all these audiences can read your releases as you write them? If not, maybe you should.

Second, have you considered how much community relations has blended into media relations as a result of the Internet?

Today, the public can learn more about your organization than ever before – whether from your website or links found by conducting a search on Google, which may taken them to information that you can’t control. Shareholders for example can find information faster and easier which means investors relations people have to be on their toes.

Further, the Internet has changed the shelf-life of your press releases and web pages. In the past a press release had a very short existence. It was either used or trashed. Now, links to releases from five years ago may still be on your website, and if not, they could be indexed in a search engine database, which means someone can find those links and possibly the releases – even if they are no longer on your website.

How many of you recognize the potential problems of not removing old or corrected pages from your web server? If you don’t remove old pages and press releases that do not reflect who you are today those documents can be found and their impact can be problematic.

At first blush fax machines and email seemed to make things easier and for a while they did, but as is the case with much of technology – think of the cellphone for example – we’ve reached a point where the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.

Take fax machines. Remember when the New York Times and other media stopped giving out their fax number because they were getting bombarded and didn’t like paying for all that paper? Plus when you send a fax to a general number you have no idea of who sees it – even if you put a cover sheet on it.

No sooner did you get settled using fax when along came email. But email has its own problems. Spam filters and the volume of emails like the volume of faxes in the past may mean your email won’t get through or if it does, because of the volume factor the intended recipient may not get to it right away.

The same scenario is mirrored with the Internet.

Today there are multiple ways to communicate directly your target audiences that you did not have in the past. In fact, in the past the news media was a necessary evil. Without it, the cost of communicating directly to any audience was very expensive. Today you can by-pass the media and go directly to your audience by posting documents on your website, making sure that they are indexed by search engines, and emailing your releases to anyone whose email you can capture.

However, getting into a search engine database requires your site to be spidered by that search engine which may mean re-submitting your site, and getting your releases indexed by a search engine is not the same thing as their being indexed by a news aggregator.

(A news aggregator captures content and repackages it or subjects it to a search algorithm meant to make it more accessible to the customer.)

Bottom line? Releases posted to your website may be found on Google, but they won’t automatically show up on Google News. Stories written from your releases that were posted to certain media websites, however, will…which takes us back to how do you get the media to use your releases?

Search engines and news aggregators are not the only opportunity for pushing your content to the general public. Other channels include bloggers, websites that selectively post news stories about, or of interest, to their members/subscribers, RSS readers, webcasting, and let’s not forget email.

That’s the good news, but it’s also the bad news in that there’s a learning curve involved in mastering each of these technologies. Plus, more ways to deliver content, just like more television channels, only means your audience is being splintered into finer and finer segments, making it harder and harder to reach them.

New technology creates new opportunities, and for a while, can make life easier. But, technological change also creates new challenges and can increase our workload.

And so the revolution continues. Technology changes expectations as well as behavior, forcing service providers to improve their offerings which in turn feeds the cycle until it seems that there’s a revolution in how things are done every six months.

PR professionals I talk to still complain about not having enough time and being overwhelmed by the amount of information they are required to manage while having to learn how to operate PDAs, code web pages and create blogs.

Good or bad that trend will continue. To keep up pr professionals should not be shy in asking their service providers to provide a range of integrated communications and information management tools. Good companies want to hear from their customers because they understand the revolution is just beginning.

 


Peter G. Pollak is the founder and current serves as chairman of Empire Information Services, Inc. (EIS). EIS has provided press release distribution services to government agencies, private businesses, associations, non-profit institutions, political campaigns and other news sources since 1986. Prior to founding EIS, Pollak was editor of two weekly newspapers and earned a Ph.D. in history and education from the University at Albany.

Email: ppollak@eisinc.com
Company Profile: Empire Information Services Inc
Company URL: http://www.empirenewswire.com

 

 

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